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The St. Vrain Valley School District is looking at the potential to put a bond question on the 2024 ballot, which could include funding a new high school.
Superintendent Don Haddad told the school board on Wednesday that he’d been getting a number of questions related to Erie High School and wanted to share some information about how the district approaches schools reaching student capacity.
Haddad said the district planning team is looking at a bond initiative for the ballot in 2024, though that would not be official until and if the school board approved it. He explained that bonds represent the entire school district, not just individual communities or a single project, and that many areas in the St. Vrain district are seeing rapid growth.
Erie, however, is one of the fastest growing.
According to the district’s October 2021/2022 enrollment report, Erie High School has more than doubled in student enrollment since 2012, growing by nearly 1,000 students in 10 years. It is the biggest high school in the district by enrollment, and is at 118% its capacity, according to the enrollment report, with 1,713 students this school year.
Haddad told the board during the meeting that the school’s core facilities — the lunchroom, auditorium and gymnasium — were built for up to 2,000 students.
The superintendent added that the location of any new school has not been determined, but that the district is working with Erie to identify potential sites.
“School locations and the timeline for the build is based on many different factors, including when the student yield in the community is high enough to open the new school with a critical mass of students,” district spokesperson Kerri McDermid explained in an email.
Haddad said 13% of students are open enrolled at Erie High School, meaning those students attend Erie rather than the high school assigned to them based on residence. With the school at capacity, open enrollment will be phased out, which is a common practice for the district.
He emphasized that when contemplating the opening of a new school, it’s important to make sure there will be enough students to support it. Open enrollment can provide some flexibility.
“You don’t want to open up a school and leave it half empty because you’ll be fiscally strained, and you can’t manage those kinds of resources financially,” Haddad said.
He said there had also been some questions about what upgrades Erie High has seen. The building, which opened in 2005, was designed to accommodate expansions. The district in recent years has added 16 classrooms, built a lyceum, renovated its science and chemistry labs along with all the high schools in the district, updated the track, expanded the football bleachers, and added 60 parking spaces.
“We’ve put a lot of extra money and resources into Erie High School, but that was the plan all along,” Haddad said, noting similar expansions at Mead and Frederick high schools.
He went on to highlight the achievements of Erie High School, which has been nationally recognized and has high graduation rates on top of a variety of successful extracurricular activities.
“So what you’ve got there is an incredible high school that has been resourced fully and beyond,” Haddad said. “What I would encourage people to do is let the process unfold the way it’s unfolded for years and we will build another school when it’s appropriate to do so — not before, not after.”
The district’s 2016 bond allowed for the construction of three schools and the Innovation Center, with Soaring Heights PK-8, Grand View Elementary and the Innovation Center opening in 2018 and Highlands Elementary opening in 2021.
